1. Technical Field
This invention relates generally to portable handheld digital audio systems and more particularly to integrated circuits for a handheld audio/visual system.
2. Description of Related Art
As is known, handheld digital audio systems are becoming very popular. Such systems include digital audio players/recorders that record and subsequently playback MP3 files, WMA files, etc. Such digital audio players/recorders may also be used as digital dictaphones and file transfer devices. Further expansion of digital audio players/recorders includes providing a frequency modulation (“FM”) radio receiver such that the device offers FM radio reception.
While digital audio players/recorders are increasing their feature sets, the increase in feature sets has been done in a less than optimal manner. For instance, with the inclusion of an FM receiver in a digital audio player/recorder, the FM receiver is a separate integrated circuit from the digital audio player/recorder chip set, or integrated circuit (“IC”). As such, the FM receiver IC functions completely independently of the digital audio player/recorder IC, even though both ICs include some common functionality.
Though FM decoders have been provided, a need still exists for a method and apparatus of radio decoding that is optimized to function with a digital audio player/recorder to produce an optimized handheld audio system.